Julios
05-12-1999, 02:34 PM
Ok - well i finally got up a nice wallpaper on my desktop and was wondering how to remove those darn icons on the desktop - I could remove everything but the MY COMPUTER icon and the NETWORK NEIGHBOURHOOD icon without much fuss.
I even found a way to remove the network icon but at the sacrifice of some network functionability - no thnx.
Then i found a tweak that removed ALL the icons from the desktop - but alas - that had some undesirable side-effects such as not being able to click on the desktop to deactivate a window , or be able to copy files onto the desktop or create extra toolbars - again - no thnx.
Then i remembered reading that you can use bitmaps as your icons.
So i went into photoshop, created a new imagefile and added a second layer (which is by default transparent) - i then deleted the background layer (the layer that the image starts off with and saved the file as a copy so i could save it as name.bmp.
Then using More Properties (similar to TweakUI) I changed the icons of both My COMP and NETWORK to name.bmp. (More properties can be found here http://www.imaginary.co.za/)
ok now i had no visible icon on my desktop - but there were still two more hurdles - first of all - the icon text was surrounded by black - i wanted to get rid of it - so i searched the net and found this nifty little proggy that turns the black colour into a transparency - (this program can be found here: www.pobox.com/~jayguerette/transparent)
(read the readme to learn how to enable it to startup on every boot- it takes up less than 0.5 % of processing resources and virtually NO system memory (i checked - and i still had 95% system resources available with and without it - although i didn't test for the other types of memory usage but I'm sure it's just as neglegible - the actual exe is 25k )
Ok that hurdle was out of the way - now i actually had to remove the text itself - problem was - you have to name the icon something other than a pure blank - so i just renamed it with a space character.
Now all was fine and dandy - but i noticed that when my desktop was the active "window" there was a little white dotted border around the text (or lack of text) - the only way I managed to cheat this away was to move the icon (disable autoarrange so u can move it) into one of the corners of the screen - if ur really careful - u can actually move it into a corner so that only a tiny tiny portion of the dotted border is visible - careful though - if u move it too much to the side of the screen it becomes a toolbar.
Now this isn't a problem for me because I resize the display so that the corners are just protruding beyond the visible space of my physical monitor screen.
Keep in mind that the little dotted border only shows itself when u click on the desktop.
Anyway - hope this helps those of u that had similar problems.
And it'd be great to have someone tell me how to get rid of that white border completely without "hiding it" in those lonely corner pixels :). Any other ideas on how to remove the icons would be appreciated also.
Oh and if you don't have a background wallpaper (or if you only have a solid colour background) - that transparency proggy can change the colour of the text to match the the colour of the desktop - but as far as i know it doesn't get rid of that white border.
Juls
I even found a way to remove the network icon but at the sacrifice of some network functionability - no thnx.
Then i found a tweak that removed ALL the icons from the desktop - but alas - that had some undesirable side-effects such as not being able to click on the desktop to deactivate a window , or be able to copy files onto the desktop or create extra toolbars - again - no thnx.
Then i remembered reading that you can use bitmaps as your icons.
So i went into photoshop, created a new imagefile and added a second layer (which is by default transparent) - i then deleted the background layer (the layer that the image starts off with and saved the file as a copy so i could save it as name.bmp.
Then using More Properties (similar to TweakUI) I changed the icons of both My COMP and NETWORK to name.bmp. (More properties can be found here http://www.imaginary.co.za/)
ok now i had no visible icon on my desktop - but there were still two more hurdles - first of all - the icon text was surrounded by black - i wanted to get rid of it - so i searched the net and found this nifty little proggy that turns the black colour into a transparency - (this program can be found here: www.pobox.com/~jayguerette/transparent)
(read the readme to learn how to enable it to startup on every boot- it takes up less than 0.5 % of processing resources and virtually NO system memory (i checked - and i still had 95% system resources available with and without it - although i didn't test for the other types of memory usage but I'm sure it's just as neglegible - the actual exe is 25k )
Ok that hurdle was out of the way - now i actually had to remove the text itself - problem was - you have to name the icon something other than a pure blank - so i just renamed it with a space character.
Now all was fine and dandy - but i noticed that when my desktop was the active "window" there was a little white dotted border around the text (or lack of text) - the only way I managed to cheat this away was to move the icon (disable autoarrange so u can move it) into one of the corners of the screen - if ur really careful - u can actually move it into a corner so that only a tiny tiny portion of the dotted border is visible - careful though - if u move it too much to the side of the screen it becomes a toolbar.
Now this isn't a problem for me because I resize the display so that the corners are just protruding beyond the visible space of my physical monitor screen.
Keep in mind that the little dotted border only shows itself when u click on the desktop.
Anyway - hope this helps those of u that had similar problems.
And it'd be great to have someone tell me how to get rid of that white border completely without "hiding it" in those lonely corner pixels :). Any other ideas on how to remove the icons would be appreciated also.
Oh and if you don't have a background wallpaper (or if you only have a solid colour background) - that transparency proggy can change the colour of the text to match the the colour of the desktop - but as far as i know it doesn't get rid of that white border.
Juls